


A Balrog of Morgoth

by Shirimikaze



Category: Stray Kids (Band)
Genre: Fluff and Humor, M/M, if anyone gets the reference in the title please marry me immediately, this... has a twist, warning for chan ruining furniture with a wet bottle because he doesn't give a fuck in this economy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-07
Updated: 2018-08-07
Packaged: 2019-06-23 06:17:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15600135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shirimikaze/pseuds/Shirimikaze
Summary: Minho is an escort, well-acquainted with the luxuries and thrills of night life.Bang Chan isn't an average client, to say the least.





	A Balrog of Morgoth

**Author's Note:**

> I know I say this literally every time but lemme be real with you here chief this is the worst thing I have written

The bright street lights in the glamorous district matched the chatter of the people who still roamed outside at such an hour.

The sun never set for the rich.

Minho had his arms crossed over the rolled down car window, chin propped as he followed pedestrians with his gaze. When the car gradually slowed down in front of a building with glass walls, he was left to lazily blink at his reflection.

The disco playlist Minho had personally picked out for longer rides faded to silence along with the engine. “Shoot me a text if something feels wrong, alright?” Woojin instructed in a stern voice while still gripping the steering wheel.

Minho lightly poked the center of Woojin’s forehead with a finger. “You’ll get premature wrinkles if you keep worrying so much about me,” he quipped while rolling the window up.

“I’m serious,” Woojin’s frown didn’t drop, “What does the guy even plan on doing with you for 9 hours? That’s just sketchy.”

“Hey, don’t be jealous just because you don’t have stamina like that.” The seatbelt buckle simply clicked a few times as if to mock Minho before finally letting him go. His hand lingered on the car door after opening it. “I’ll be careful, trust me,” he promised in a softer voice. “Go rest up now.”

The sound of the car engine got lost in the lively night. Minho was left in the company of nothing but his own reflection. Woojin had dropped him off at the exact address, a few minutes early as per usual. He spent a moment scrutinizing his frame in the building’s glass exterior, making sure the clothes he had picked out for the occasion hugged him the slightest bit tighter in all the right places.

Reaching the entrance, he stopped for just long enough to take a deep breath.

Minho was met by polished wooden furniture and smooth carpeting once he pushed the double doors open. Paintings hanging on the walls on either side of the lobby stared back at him. It wasn’t rare to stumble upon affluent clients in his line of work, yet the way sparkles pooled in his irises when he marveled over the chandelier overhead was an evergreen kind of fascination.

A receptionist in a nicely pressed coat stood behind a desk in a corner of the lobby. He calmly observed as Minho approached, slow and graceful, trying to win some time to pick out the appropriate words. “I’m supposed to meet a certain Bang Chan,” Minho stated when not more than a few steps separated them, hoping the lilt to his sentence did a good enough job of explaining he didn’t quite know where to find his client.

“I've been notified,” the receptionist replied in a firm tone. “Follow me.”

The two didn’t exchange any more words as they walked towards the elevator at the end of the lobby. There they stood quietly side by side while they went up, only faint rumbles from outside attempting to fill the space.

The receptionist didn’t spare Minho another glance until the moment they reached one of the top floors and the doors opened once more. Minho was certain the undone buttons of his dress shirt and the light makeup spoke enough of what his reason to come was. What he wondered about was whether he wasn’t of much interest due to simple indifference, or merely because it wasn’t uncommon for someone like him to be beckoned over to this side of town.

Going by the button in the elevator, it was the sixteenth floor. “Apartment 97,” the receptionist uttered while pointing at a lacquered wooden door at the end of the hallway. “The door should be unlocked.” Those were the last of his instructions before he returned inside the elevator to head back to his post behind the lobby desk.

Minho figured he’d been ambling about more than enough. He pushed the door open right away, not bothering to knock lest he scratched the surface that seemed as expensive аs what he earned in a night.  A few quick glances around the spacious empty foyer were enough to determine likely nobody would had heard him regardless.

After chucking his shoes by the door, Minho decided to do what he did best – sneak around. He rounded the first corner his eyes stumbled upon, fully intent on exploring a bit until he happened to be found by someone.

The short journey led him to what seemed like the apartment's living room, all dense furniture and smooth surfaces. The set-up in the lobby downstairs paled in comparison. Minho lightly pattered on the parquet while looking through shelves of heirlooms decorating the walls and glass screens shielding carefully placed fine china. On a low coffee table in the middle of the room stood a bottle of light wine, beads of water slowly rolling down the glass and pooling around its bottom.

Minho plopped down on the long leather couch behind the table, all the grace from earlier gone and forgotten. He slowly ran his fingers through the soft fabric of one of the throw pillows,   
playing with the tassels hanging from each corner.

"You know, I was half-joking when I told the company to send me the prettiest they have, but I really don't regret saying that now," a voice exclaimed in slight awe from behind.

Minho startled, fumbling with the decorative pillow a bit before dropping it in his lap and letting it be. He turned around to face the source of the voice and raised an eyebrow in   
interest.

Leaning on a door frame on the other side of the living room was a young man, notably younger than Minho's average clients. He was dressed more casually than one would expect for the occasion, loose t-shirt and sweatpants hanging off his frame, but his skin looked pleasantly smooth under the artificial living room lighting, and the way his hair slightly curled at the ends made Minho wonder if it would be just as soft to the touch as the throw pillows were.

"Bang Chan, I assume?" Minho asked. Once the boy answered with a simple nod, Minho cocked his head playfully to the side. "Took you long enough," he teased, "I got lonely." His lips lightly raised into a smile practised many times, one that has made many people wordlessly comply.

With a light chuckle Chan headed to the couch and took a seat next to Minho. He had brought along two fancy-looking glasses for the wine. "Hope you like white wine," Chan asked while wrestling the corkscrew off the bottle, "I just have the alcohol tolerance of a ghost and anything heavier than this would've taken me out."

Minho snorted. "Let me help," he said after Chan's consecutive unsuccessful attempt at pulling the cork screw out. "And for the record, I am down for just about any kind of wine."

The bottle opened with a loud pop. After Minho poured enough for the both of them, they clinked their glasses in a simple toast and took a plentiful sip each.

Minho caught the curious once-over Chan was giving him while drinking. It would had been a lie to say the attention wasn't pleasant.

The wine glass lightly clattered once Chan set it down on the coffee table. "So," he tentatively began, and Minho's attention spiked, "to get to the point. I have one important question before we begin."

"And what might that be?" Minho straightened his back and slowly crossed his legs, hoping his   
mannerism was perceived as sultry as intended.

Chan flashed a smile, soft and genuine, brighter than Minho was used to seeing, but that wasn't what caught Minho off guard.

"Have you watched " _ Lord of the Rings _ " before?"

Minho almost choked on his wine.

"Pardon?"

"” _ Lord of the Rings _ ”, you know, the fantasy series," Chan emphasised the last word in a way that shouldn't have been possible to be so adorable.

"I mean, I've been meaning to watch it, I just haven't gotten around to it yet," Minho explained. While he was attempting to connect the dots in his head, Chan excitedly pulled out a remote from between the couch cushions.

"Then sit back and get comfortable because I have some good news for you tonight," Chan stated with the excitement of a toddler while fiddling with the settings on the TV hanging on the wall in front.

Minho took a long swig of wine for the sake of his sanity.

"You..." Minho began, trying to collect his metaphorical marbles and explain himself as eloquently as he could given the circumstances, "you're aware I'm an escort, right?"

"Quite aware."

"And you know my services aren't exactly cheap either?"

"That's my concern, not yours. All you have to worry about right now is what food you want me to fetch because 9 long hours await."

  
  
  


 

While Frodo was facing an existential crisis, Minho casually had his socked feet propped up on the coffee table next to Chan’s, a bowl of popcorn in his lap. His lip gloss was utterly ruined at that point, but he doubted Chan minded much.

“Can I ask you something?” Minho asked, vaguely invested in Frodo’s wanderlust in the meantime.

“Sure.”

Minho hoped the way he was mercilessly crunching on the popcorn didn’t make him seem idle, considering how persistently his curiosity was flaring. “Of all the possible people you could’ve had a movie marathon with, how come you ended up hiring an escort?” 

“My friends  _ suck,”  _ Chan exclaimed with a pout that easily found its way on his features, as if it was the most obvious reply in the world. “They have a shorter attention span than that moldy piece of cheese I forgot at the back of the fridge. Someone either would’ve fallen asleep or thrown popcorn in my hair till I switched the channel.”

Sudden mental images of Woojin impatiently tapping the steering wheel every time Minho was the slightest bit late from a job came to mind. “Okay, that’s fair.” 

Minho took it all in stride from then on, simply observing the hobbits leave the Shire to chase adventures and thrill, and leaning his head on Chan’s shoulder for comfort’s sake.

  
  
  


 

The minutes piled up just like the various snacks on the coffee table. 

_ (“Literally shut the hell up, these hands were made for gentle stuff, like holding dick, not this brute tomfoolery,” Minho fussed, his face a bit red from all the effort unsuccessfully poured into ripping a rice cracker packet open, quite tempted to just chuck the whole thing right at Chan’s laughing face.) _

“Can I ask you something too?” Chan tentatively picked up while Frodo was just about ready to die.

“Shoot,” Minho acknowledged off-handedly, surprisingly absorbed in the plot. He found it in him to spare a glance, though, when Chan took a while to carry on.

In the background, Arwen was saving Frodo’s life, and basically the entire plot alongside him, but that suddenly wasn’t quite as important in the grand scheme of things. “Would you mind…” Chan trailed off and opened his arms after a second’s silence, as if that alone sufficed as an elaboration. Nevertheless, Minho’s confused squint prompted him to finish his sentence. “Cuddling a bit?”

There was an endearing faint blush resting on Chan’s dimples, the cause of which most definitely couldn’t be traced back to the half-empty wine bottle at the foot of the table.

Minho was trying his hardest to stifle that laugh trying to wiggle its way up his lips. “Do you think I’d mind, considering what I usually get asked to do? Come here, you big nerd.”

  
  
  
  


Somewhere  between the hobbits being taken to Isengard and the bottle of wine ending up empty and abandoned, Chan ended up as the little spoon in Minho's arms.

  
  
  
  


The part where the Fellowship of the Ring must part ways always made Chan emotional. He couldn’t quite get into it this time, however, seeing as Frodo’s words of wisdom got cut off by soft unintelligible murmurs coming from the couch. Chan carefully shifted just enough to be able to see Minho fast asleep, a stray word or two of sleep talk leaving him every now and then. His hair was a mess and his makeup had smudged, yet he looked serene.

Chan couldn’t stop smiling for a long while after.  
  
  
  
  


Woojin was tapping the steering wheel again. The rhythm of his fingers matched the pace of the windshield wipers.

A head suddenly poked into the open window of the passenger seat, and it would had been a lie to say Woojin didn’t quite wish to strangle Minho after getting startled in the most pathetically predictable way.

“A 9 hour request, and you still had it in you to be late. I’ll be mad if you didn’t get at least a tip,” Woojin sourly noted. The empty paper cups in the cup holder of the car apparently hadn’t done their job of supplying enough caffeine. The creases of Woojin’s sleepy pout were an almost comical contrast to the pretty pink sunrise-ridden sky blooming above the horizon.

“I got something even better,” Minho noted while pulling his seatbelt over, not even trying to conceal his glee. Woojin’s strangulation urges sharpened when, instead of simply explaining the outcome in a clear manner, Minho shoved his phone in Woojin’s face with a new phone contact on the screen. The single :) smiley face next to the name “Chan” in the contact name was apparently intended to be cute. It seemed a tad menacing, but Woojin wasn’t about to voice that thought of his out loud; that was most likely the sleep deprivation speaking.

While the car lazily drove down the rich neighbourhood street, Minho fondly sank back into his seat. He didn’t feel a need to curiously peer out the window again. He knew he’d have a chance to acquaint himself with the neighbourhood in the near future. He’d have to return to marathon “ _ The Hobbit _ ” with a certain nerd as well.

**Author's Note:**

> ... and now the weather
> 
> [inspired by a tweet of mine](https://twitter.com/shimramyun/status/1021465038455001089); the idea didn't leave my head for 2 weeks so here we are now, hope this made you at least crack a smile


End file.
